Emilie
by thedorkygirl
Summary: Amelia thinks that Claudia is just strong enough.AmyCJ. Repost


**title**: Emilie  
**author**: Keren Ziv  
**spoilers** Privateers  
**rating**: M  
**summary**:_Amelia thinks that Claudia is just strong enough._

and dedicated to the cheerleader, **Jessica**

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In the late of the night you whisper her name against her sex and the movement of your lips brings her close. You two dance and she loves it, adores the way the six letters of her name roll of your tongue like a prayer, like a curse.

She's Amelia to you when she was never Amelia before, not even to Chris. She lets you tease the mole on her back with your tongue and wonders why you're Claudia when they were never Christopher or even Josh. But then your fingers start moving up her thigh, joining your lips and tongue, and all she can think is her long name.

She's playing games that her mother would have never thought of playing and it pleases her, with her spun out matronymic hung gauzily over the affair.

It all makes her think of F. Scott Fitzgerald and so she blows out the candles. There can't be any fire now, but you place your bare skin against hers, your breasts pressed into her back, and she reaches down behind her to touch you.

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She can feel how flushed your flesh is beneath her fingers and she is pleased how her presence affects you so. The afternoon is fast fading into evening and the room is red with the sun, but she doesn't care because it's Sunday and on Sunday she never cares. She traces the curve of your breasts lazily, trying to see your skin in the dark. It's impossible.

There is a blanket of anonymity with the black, without the image of your pinkening flesh or the burgundy of your nipple. She isn't sure if this is what she wants or not; she's worked all her life to be noticed, to make certain that her lovers didn't forget who they were dealing with

(Amy Gardner, with ivory skin that would frost to rose when they touched her and, and oh, yes, there; the girl with the matchless voice that sounded illegal when she cried out your name)

and she was good at it. She only failed once before, but she never had a chance with him. She hopes, truly does, that you're different. She's afraid it's too much the same.

The shape of her frown is kissed into your thigh.

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When you work, you do it with all you have. She watches you fight the vicious news reporters that stab at you with their careful works, so violently that it makes you cringe, but you let them deflect easily off of your armor. Where do you get that?

She doesn't think that she could ever do what you do, allow yourself to be second, because she feels that she would be too strong (weak) for that. She has too little self control to keep her feelings in check. Her emotions would be displayed across her face like a sort of movie. Come and watch the press secretary tell the nation's secrets, they would say.

She also knows that it would be horrible, being kept last. Choosing not to know because she would want to lie to the press without knowing as if she was lying to the press.

And so she watches you and admires you and thinks to herself that maybe, maybe you're weaker (stronger) than her in some areas and stronger (weaker) than her in others.

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Her mother was Spanish-Dutch, a family whose roots went further back into Europe's history than she cared to listen about when she was younger and than she was able to research after the funeral. Coming into English secondly, Katrina gave her daughter her aunt's name, deep, rich, and beautiful.

Her mother was a strong, proud woman, with her culture held tightly to her bosom. A strikingly beautiful woman, she had been brought up, her daughters learned early on, by an intensely religious mother and a somber, stoic father. Katrina followed her parents example to the letter, and raised her children as she was raised, next to a reserved and serious man.

Katrina needed to daughters to be dressed cleanly, with hair brushed immaculately, curled on Sundays. Their outfits were always smart frocks that made Amy's neck itch, that gave the twins a rash on their stomach where the underside of the lace would rub against their poor skin. They were innocent and perfect, the daughter that Katrina had been.

Thomas Gardner adored his daughters, with their soft American names that gave his wife a feel of the Netherlands. He was the one who gave them their nicknames, Amy and Julie and Lena, and who filled out their information for school, the doctor, and the dentist. When the twins needed braces in the four grade, Thomas carefully signed and dated and made sure his insurance would cover it.

Seeing her father doing all of that made her angry.

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Her mother named her after an aunt who died in the war. That's all she was ever told, all she ever heard of the story. She isn't even certain which war, can't quite remember the first time she asked, but she knows, with certainty, it was a war.

She wonders if she was a civilian. She has these thoughts that maybe the aunt was some savior of a poor soldier boy and was shot when the enemy caught up. She pictures the scene sometimes, even in her grown days, and can almost see the blood on her aunt's lips as she falls.

Her mother would always say, "Emilie, please, calm down. Your aunt was always so calm. Why can't you be more like her?"

And she would frown and go to her father and cry out that she wasn't no Dutch girl, she was Amy, and would Mama please stop calling her that? She felt as if she would crumble into the dust of her aunt, flittering away, and so she blocked her ears to it all.

Names are important to her, though she hasn't quite figured out why.

She has her fingers inside you.

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She's thought it through, she has, and she's come to a conclusion.

Her names have everything to do with her relationship. With her mother and the long luxurious name of a secret past that was hardly ever spoken on in specifics, just generalizations

("You grandfather loved to fish, and he would take me out with him because I was the only girl who would ever help him at all. He wished for a son, that man")

that never fully gave away a story, she was bound closely to the fabric. She had felt strangled and unimportant in her mother's house, breaking away from the role that had been placed on her

("Emilie, stop playing with the boys and come help Juliana and Carolina get dressed")

to become something more.

Her father called her Amelia and Amy, and she thinks about the ebb and flow and give and take of the love in that relationship and smiles.

In school she was only Amy and refused to answer to anything else.

The shorter the name, the less chance she gave to the relationship. Like Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Joshua is expected to burn, to be a bright and glorious fling, a flame of awesome heat, but in the end nobody mourned at the funeral, nobody except one poor, confused part of her that expected no more than James Gatz. It isn't right of her.

She wonders if maybe she thought of Joshua as the son, and she was Henry Gatz, proud even when things didn't go completely by plan. Perhaps she sees herself more as Daisy, playing with him because it is something to do, amuse herself.

She doesn't remember, and so she flicks her tongue over your sex and tastes.

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Later, when she's washing her face, she wonders about Emilie, both herself and her great-aunt long dead, and tries understand everything.

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Your skin is mantled with the color of sex and she think what you're doing might be illegal in some of the southern states, though she isn't certain how specific the laws might be. She grazes the tips of her fingers over your curls, feeling their coarseness on her pads like a file.

Life is difficult.

She's worked all her life to fix what her mother did, to make certain that she played with the boys and filled out her own forms at the doctor's office. She calls herself Amy and she never tells anybody that nobody spells her name Amelia at home, though they might say it like that. She thinks maybe she can sum her life up in a sentence:

She is neither innocent nor perfect.


End file.
